A Remarkable Arrival-The Three Travellers-The Banquet-Surprise of the Guests-Marco Polo and his Works-First Journey of the Elder Poli-The Tartar Empire-Jenghis Khan and his Conquests-Kublai Khan-His Wish to Open Communications with Europe-His Commission to the BrothersTheir Second Journey, in Company with Marco-Panic of their Monkish Companions-Marco's Account of Cashmere-Journey Across the Great Desert of Gobi.

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IN year of grace 1295 there arrived in the splendid and wealthy

city of Venice three travellers, whose appearance may well have excited some attention even in that place, then the emporium of commerce of the Western world, and thronged not only with travellers from all parts of Christendom, but with visitors also from the lands of "Heathenesse"-grave Moors, keen-eyed Copts, and many a swarthy visitor from the lands that lie beneath the tropic sun. Two of our travellers were men already past the prime of life, while the third had not yet reached the age of forty years. Their faces were tanned and weather-stained; their threadbare garments, of a shape and make unknown in Venice, proclaimed them newly arrived from some distant land; and even their speech, though Italian for the greater part, was mingled with many strange words which none but themselves could understand. Great was the astonishment, and equally great the doubt and incredulity in Venice, when one of the sunburnt strangers announced himself as Maffeo Polo, the head of a patrician family of Venetian merchants, and declared his two companions to be Niccolo Polo, his brother, and Marco, the son of Niccolo, just returned to their native city, after an absence of no less than twenty-four years, spent in travels to the farthest corners of the world.

So long a time had elapsed, indeed, since the departure of the persons who had been known under these names in Venice, that the city was loath to accept the statement of the travellers; the more so, perhaps, as the claims of these men to be acknowledged as the Poli involved the overturning of some existing and long-established arrangements. That three Poli had actually left Venice nearly a quarter of a century before was remembered by many of the older inhabitants, but

the absent ones had long been given up as dead, and the handsome palace belonging to the family in the Strada San Giovanni Chrisostomo

had for years been in the possession of one of their kindred; and admittance was at first refused them, and only at length reluctantly

granted when various circumstances combined to prove that these poorly-clad personages were indeed the long-forgotten Poli, and that their marvellous tale of a long residence as honoured guests and trusted ministers at the court of a great Asiatic potentate was not the fable it at first appeared. Soon it became manifest, also, that the pecuniary circumstances of the returned wanderers were not to be accurately judged by the lowliness of their apparel. They were evidently wealthy, and their biographer, Ramusio, relates the manner in which they contrived to place this important fact altogether beyond dispute.

After obtaining possession of their own house it seems they invited their numerous relatives and connections to a grand banquet. This mediæval house-warming was arranged on a scale that throws the most splendid of modern festivities into the shade. The three travellers issued from their apartments to meet their guests in the dining-hall habited in long flowing robes of crimson satin. After the washing of hands, the preliminary ceremony at grand entertainments in those days, the hosts exchanged their satin robes for similar dresses of damask, the suits in which they had entered the banqueting-hall being given as "largesse" to the attendants. After the first course they appeared in new garments more costly than the last, the material in this instance being crimson velvet, and in due sequence the damask and the velvet garments were given to the servants, the hosts now habiting themselves in plain suits, such as were worn by their guests. And now came a surprise which completely eclipsed the magnificence of these preliminaries.

After the servants had retired from the room, Marco Polo brought in the three patched, threadbare suits which had produced so unfavourable an impression in Venice upon the return of the travellers. One of these suits he handed to his father, and another to his uncle, retaining the remaining one for himself; and then they all three began to rip up the seams and patches in the unsightly garments with their knives; then, even as the toad, "ugly and venomous," is said, in poetical parlance, to wear "a precious jewel in its head," so did these tattered and unsightly shells disclose kernels of inestimable worth. Carbuncles, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds, cunningly sewn up in the despised garments, were displayed in magnificent profusion before the dazzled eyes of the guests. The travellers, it appeared, had chosen this method of conveying home the bounty of the great Asiatic prince whom they served; and all doubts as to their identity, and as to the